The Frenchman (Crime Royalty Romance Book 1) Read online

  The elevator reached the top floor, and I stepped out into a marble-walled vestibule before the elevator doors had finished opening.

  I never felt so sure, so strong, in my life.

  I halted in front of the only door, and heard the faint noise of television. A sports match. He’s home. I knocked with emotion that should have warranted a loud boom, but it turned out to be a light knock.

  After a moment, when I steeled my resolve, the door opened.

  Not Louis.

  A man with salt and pepper hair, a nasty scar above his lip and astute eyes, scanned me. “Oui?” he asked rudely.

  I hesitated, but then thought, I’m all in.

  “Je suis venue pour voir Louis.”

  He scanned me much more carefully, and his dark eyes stopped at the cash in my hand. After his eyebrows rose, ever so slightly, his face relaxed and a side hitched up. He shrugged and opened the door wider.

  I stepped into another foyer, encased in a marble, circular partition. With one last wave of jacked-up energy, I barreled around the wall, quickly scanning the, holy massive, space, hesitating only to admire the incredible view provided from floor-to-ceiling windows everywhere. Gorgeous kitchen, too. I sucked in a waft of cooked chicken. God I missed meat. Pausing to get my bearings—this was an extremely large suite—I followed the faint sound of the television sports game. There was the living room. I spotted a giant flat screen against a wall, blinds tugged down around it.

  My heart was going a mile a minute, my hands shaking. I couldn’t turn back now. I stepped down the two stairs, powered across the empty dining room area, into the living room space, aiming straight for the middle, where . . . my eyes scanned quickly . . . there were others present, two, I think, standing behind one sectional.

  Ah-ha!

  There sat Louis, legs wide apart, on a giant leather sofa, a remote in one hand and an empty plate of chicken bones beside him. He was in a pair of track pants and nothing else. To say he was shocked, when he realized the girl standing in front of him was not a cute American announcer suddenly on his TV screen, was an understatement.

  “Fleur,” he exclaimed sitting forward, absolutely no fat bunching at the waist.

  “What the hell is this?!” I shouted at him, waving the cash.

  I watched red sprout in his cheeks as he glanced around at the chilled room, and back on me. His eyes took in the money, and my other hand on my hip. He stood up to his full, mighty height, extra slow, his eyes steady on me.

  But I wasn’t intimidated. Not in the least. He was way out of line.

  “You know what? In America, you pay—” I shook the wad of cash at him “—after you’ve finished the transaction.” I threw the money at him but it didn’t get very far. It kind of fluttered to the floor.

  Holy cow. Did I really just say that? That is not what I had meant to say. It just came out.

  Waves of regret rippled through me as he pulled his head back, and his lips bunched up, contemptuous. Disgust spread on his face like ink.

  And who could blame him? There I was, standing in his living room, lamenting the fact he had not fucked me. Oh sweet mercy.

  I heard a snicker, but I couldn’t concentrate on that. No. Because my mind was sorting through the facts, desperately aware that at some point it had made an assumption about the money, and possibly, I gulped, a very wrong assumption.

  But wait. Maybe I hadn’t been wrong. Darkness flickered across his face, and worse, it completely smoothed out, expressionless.

  The energy in the room shifted, or rather, his energy had changed.

  His eyes raked over me, slowly taking me in. He lingered on my breasts, deliberately, finally squaring me in his sights.

  Thud, thud, thud. My heart was drumming inside. It was saying, “Get out, get out, get out.”

  “Alors. In America, how much does a virgin cost?”

  Chapter 6

  Oof.

  I gaped and gasped for air, but none made it down my windpipe.

  He’d just sucker punched me a fourth time.

  Blood flooded my face. I clutched my stomach. He’d insulted me. But, by the way he was visually undressing me, drilling into me with that hungry stare . . .

  He was serious.

  Was he?

  Yes. Yes, he was. He was propositioning me. In front of a room of, oh my God, three men, including the one who had let me in. Check: make that highly animated, brutish men.

  Awareness dropped on me like an elephant out of the sky—what a huge mistake I’d made.

  Louis was a bad man. No, make that rotten. I needed to get away from there, and him, right away. I needed to forget him. So there could be no confusion, I said, “I’m not a whore,” as I stepped away. But he grabbed my arm, fear spliced through me, and held me firm on the spot.

  I gaped at him.

  “Then don’t act like one.”

  A soft gasp came out of my mouth.

  Had I? Acted like one? Head spinning, I searched his face, panicked further by the telltale burning in the back of my nose. In Texas, being called a whore is pretty much the worst thing you can say to a woman, or, at least one who had been raised in the kind of house I had—even if she was trying to get in touch with her inner sexy.

  My bottom lip trembled.

  He exhaled, shook his head, and said, “Fleur.”

  The last thing I needed was pity. I yanked hard, twisted up my arm, and he let go, thank God. I dashed back the way I came, across the large, empty dining room area, up the steps, into the foyer, so close to escaping.

  But the man who had let me in was blocking the door. He had backtracked the other way.

  “Pardon!” I gasped. Attempting to push past him, I brushed up against his right side. Something cool and hard knocked against my arm, stopping me short. I sucked in air and stepped back, spying the edge of a leather holster under his leather jacket.

  “Was that . . . a gun?,” my teary eyes asked his hard brown ones. Wait, I recognized him now—one of Louis’s brothers?

  He was examining me very closely, appearing to work out some complex mathematical equation. Done, he looked over my shoulder, presumably at Louis, who I sensed was on my tail. The man tilted his head sideways and pushed his lips down, the expression, “Well, well, well.”

  “Fleur,” I heard Louis say. He grabbed me from behind and holding me close to him, commandeered me down the hall. With one arm, he lifted me right off of the ground, opened the door, swung me into his bedroom, and slammed the door closed behind us with the other. I barely had time to note how empty the very large room was—just a king-sized bed, a dresser, and quite a few suitcases—before I spun around.

  “What are you doing here?” he snapped, standing before me, his arms out at his sides, hands out. His face was twisted, like he was in pain.

  I clasped my hands together. Who was this man? And what was his friggin’ problem? Calm down. He asked you what you are doing here. That was not what I was expecting. For example, he should have started with an apology.

  “You sent money, remember?” I exclaimed, surprised at the degree of my upset. “If you think for a second I would take that—”

  “The money was for your dress! The one I ruined!”

  Oh.

  Oh.

  I shrunk inside.

  Oh my God.

  Of course it was for the dress.

  My face was on fire.

  How could I forget about the dress? How he heard Marie mention it during the elevator incident? Of course he would interpret “expensive” to mean thousands of euros rather than the hundreds that I equated to breaking the bank. How could I think he would pay me for sex? How could I be so stupid?

  I stared at the carpet, burning a hole in it, unable to meet his eyes. I mean, paying for my dress was a sweet gesture, too.

  Oh, no. No. No. No.

  What do you say when you mistakenly accuse a man of propositioning you, and then rail at him publicly for not doing you? No wonder he’d chastised me lik
e that in front of those men.

  What was wrong with me? This wasn’t me. Was it? I was not the kind of person to act so irrationally.

  Uh, yes, I was. It was one hundred percent vintage Fleur.

  I hid my face in my hands.

  “Je suis désolée,” I whispered.

  The silence was unbearable.

  I dared to glance at him.

  His eyebrows were raised as high as I had ever seen them, his face ghostly white.

  My stomach backflipped.

  I got that he was upset, but it wasn’t that bad. He could accept my apology, and let me leave, and we could go back to ignoring each other. Maybe . . . maybe I would follow up with a flirty thank you note for the kind offer of paying for my dress.

  “Why did you come here?” he asked again. “My brother Georges . . .” He just stared at me, distant, leaving his remark unfinished, and gazed at the ground, shaking his head.

  Something was wrong, beyond “crazy woman in his apartment” wrong. His hands were in tight fists.

  “Your brother, what?” I tried, shifting, glancing around. I wanted to leave, badly. I’d said I was sorry. Wasn’t that enough?

  Eyes back on me, he said, “Tu devrais avoir peur. (You should be scared.)” I hadn’t heard a negative—and yet his tone wasn’t a threat so much as a gently delivered notice: “Hey, just so you know, the boat’s got a giant hole in it and we’re going to sink.” It was baffling. I should be scared? Why? Because I’d made a fool out of myself? Embarrassed was more like it.

  We stared at each other. I tried to think of something to say, but I pulled complete blanks. “I’m leaving now,” I whispered, stepping forward, feeling lighter than air.

  “Non,” he said, alarmed, adding, “just a moment, s’il te plaît.”

  He shook his head. After running his hand through his hair, he clutched the back of his neck. What was he doing? Working something out? He took me in with a brand new expression—pleasantness. I noticed he was unshaven. Sexily unshaven.

  “C’est fait,” he said, lowering his arms fatalistically. He smiled at me, as though he’d just realized someone else was in the room with him. Someone who he liked, very much.

  His words were “It’s done.” What’s done?

  He seemed pleased.

  I was more confused than ever. So, now, everything was okay?

  I searched for a sign, any explanation, in his expression. He drank me in with open want, before slipping back on a genial mask.

  “Let us begin again,” he offered, a perfectly welcoming tone, a deadly handsome smile. My eyes, wide, wandered down to the abs-tastic land, and back up to his face. “I would take you to dinner to apologize for my terrible behavior, hm, non? Let me make this up to you. A third chance pour moi?”

  He asked this with tenderness in his voice, his eyebrows drawn together gently, vulnerably?

  My heart had begun a thrum from its play-dead state. Wha— What? He was asking me out on a date? Why?

  “You mean a date?”

  “Bien sûr.”

  Why the change of tune? He was being . . . charming. When we first met, he’d said he didn’t need charm. None of it made sense.

  “But, I thought, before, when we met, and you left . . .?” More blood crept into my cheeks.

  “Pardon, but when I realized your innocence, I didn’t want to hurt you.” He glanced at me sheepishly. He meant emotionally, I guessed, rather than physically, although, from what I’d seen through his pants, that was a concern of mine, too. I wanted to say “So who is the whore now?” but I bit my lip. “And now?” I asked instead, quickly, my pulse on pause. What he’d just admitted wasn’t exactly the greatest enticement. He’d already hurt me. Moving forward, he could only do worse.

  “And now, I change my mind.” There was a determined glint in his eyes.

  Wait, what? That’s hardly reassuring.

  “It makes no difference,” he added, “I want you.” He delivered this rather like a proclamation.

  My heart thudded, out of time. I shifted my weight to my right leg, suddenly aware of how close we were standing to his unmade bed.

  He was waiting for agreement to his dinner proposition.

  I couldn’t get over how badly I had needed him to say those words, “I want you.” I asked myself, was it because he’d rejected me before? No. I wasn’t satisfied he merely wanted me. I wanted to give him what he wanted.

  But first . . .

  “I need to be clear with you.” My cheeks were so hot you could fry an egg on them, but nevertheless I straightened my shoulders. Between the first night and my outburst today—pictures of him with all of those women flashed before me—I’d left the wrong impression.

  “I’m not a whore.”

  “And that’s why I am not treating you as one—” he looked at the bed quickly “—even if you seemed, pardonne-moi, determined to throw it away like one on the night we met.”

  I gasped. “I didn’t think I was throwing it away with you.” He needn’t protect my virtue. He had no idea what lengths I had gone to trick myself into not throwing it away.

  He smiled ever so slightly.

  Oh.

  “Is that yes, to dinner?”

  We stared at each other, on a dangerous precipice. Was it a yes? By accident, we’d reached a new, different ledge, one that didn’t instantly end in orgasm, and yet, one that was more thrilling than before.

  “Oui,” I answered, hearing Jess’s subliminal “nooooo” from across the ocean. Oh, stuff it. I couldn’t have answered any other way. For him, I was willing to ease the grip on my tightly controlled life, to see what lay on the other side, so to speak. He was my poison, apparently.

  And what about Marie? my conscience asked. There would be time to figure that out later.

  “Bien.” He smiled. “I am very glad.”

  I inhaled adequately for the first time in fifteen minutes.

  “Malheureusement, I must leave for a week, today, for a match.” He started, moving toward his dresser, glancing at me.

  Seven days. That should give me enough time to develop a list of interesting things to talk about. Wow. How had this turn of events happened?

  “That’s okay,” I murmured.

  Now that the tension was barely tolerable, I took in my surrounding and the suitcases. There was nothing on the walls. Not one knick-knack that I’d noticed.

  “I need, how do you say, decorator, non?” he asked, smiling. Could he read my mind? “I live here only on weekdays because it is close to the stadium. It will not be forever.”

  “It’s a nice place,” I quickly offered, wondering once again why he didn’t mention it the night we met.

  “Merci. I like the view,” he added, turning his impressive back to pull open a drawer.

  Curiosity flooded me: now that we’d crossed the “He Is Into You” milestone, I could admit how badly I wanted to know what really made him tick. For starters, he must be incredibly ambitious and resolute to be a professional athlete. What other experiences had shaped him into who he was today?

  He turned around halfway, asked for my number, and I watched him as he entered it into his phone. “Please, I must ask a—” he paused searching for the right word, glancing at me “—favor. I try to protect my private life from the public and the media. You do not tell anyone about our date, for now, please?” he added. “Not even family. No one. For now,” he added, watching me carefully. “Promise?”

  “Oh sure, no problem,” I said, forgetting he was a famous man. The only people I would have told were Jess and Marie; and yes, obviously at some point, if things worked out, I was going to have to dispel Marie of the bad impression she seemed to have of him.

  Doubt began to creep in. Was he just doing this to get rid of me? I had ambushed him in his own home. Oh Fleur. Another wave of embarrassment surged through me.

  He put his phone back on the dresser and awkwardly shifted toward the door, where he paused. I nearly crashed into him so eager was I
to leave—eager to closely examine events to get a proper read, erasing all the horrible bits, of course. His eyes fixed down on me.

  “I have another important condition.” I stepped back, shocked at how the close proximity had me flushed in places he couldn’t see. “If you do not agree, I will never contact you again and you are not welcome anywhere near me.”

  Geez. That seemed extreme. Did he think I was stalker material?

  “You will stay away from Bastien Vauclin.”

  My mouth popped open. Say what?

  “Uh . . .”

  “Is this a problem for you?”

  “Oh, no. I mean, it was just the one date. And there wasn’t going to be another. But, uh, why?”

  I wanted to get to the bottom of this weird, awkward unpleasantness between everyone. “My mom, Marie LaSalle, set us up, you know.” I watched him closely for a sign of recognition. “They were partners in the police force. Maybe you know her, she’s a police inspector—”

  “Regardless,” he said, his steely voice interrupting me, “this you must trust me on. He is a very bad man.”

  Funny, because he said the same about you, I wanted to fire back. But, feeling way out of my element and taken aback that he had cut me off, I only managed to scoff. Louis’s brow furrowed, and I flinched at the determined energy he shot at me. It wasn’t like he was asking me to give up something I wanted.

  “Okay,” I agreed, hands up. “Sure. No problem.”

  Satisfied, I suppose, his face relaxed. I watched his nostrils flare, and I damn near swooned thinking he might try to kiss me (making me mildly worried as I hadn’t brushed my teeth yet). He was so . . . volatile. And I liked it.

  He beheld the door with some uncertainty, and finally let me out. I practically darted down the hall, dying to make a quick exit. Anxiety swelled—at the other end, someone, hearing movement, perhaps, appeared. It was the man who had first blocked me, walking toward us. His countenance had switched from deadly serious into smarmy friendly. Louis placed a heavy hand on my shoulder.

  “Georges Messette,” proclaimed the man, hand outstretched, as we drew close. I was right—Louis’s brother. “I am sorry we were not introduced properly before,” he added in perfect English. I blushed something fierce since our first encounter involved one of man’s greatest debates: virgin or whore? His coat was off and there was no gun holster. Had I imagined that?